Victim-Defendants in Mandated Treatment: An Ethical Quandary

Abstract

Battered women are being arrested and convicted of domestic violence-related crimes in higher numbers than ever before. In addition, battered women are being sentenced to treatment as primary perpetrators even though their aggression was in response to the violence perpetrated against them. Many service providers are presently ill-equipped to offer treatment and/or other services that will effectively serve these women in a manner that will truly reduce violence and is not re-victimizing. This article will present key issues surrounding the probDonna Gardner, MA, MSW, is the Clinical Program Director at Artemis Center for Alternatives to Domestic Violence in Dayton, OH. She received an MA in Public Policy and Management and an MSW from the Ohio State University. She is independently licensed as a social worker in the state of Ohio. Prior to working at Artemis, she provided therapy at a community mental health center and worked at a rural domestic violence shelter. For the past ten years, she has provided clinical supervision to victim advocates and child therapists. She has implemented various projects, including the Montgomery County Domestic Violence Hotline and the Women Who Resort to Violence group. She has also trained police officers, prosecutors, physicians, victim advocates, and other professionals on issues concerning intimate partner violence. KEYWORDS.Battered women's use of violence, arrest of victims, intimate partner violence, advocacy, treatment of arrested women I have been providing services to battered women arrested for violent behavior against their abusers for the past nine years. I co-facilitate a group called "Women Who Resort to Violence" (WWRTV) with another facilitator from a local batterer intervention program. The group is held at the Artemis Center for Alternatives to Domestic Violence, an advocacy center in Dayton, OH that has been in operation for over 20 years.It should be noted that the context for beginning and continuing this group has included the recent passage of a preferred arrest statute that often appears to be implemented as if it were a mandatory arrest statute, and a state that has no batterer intervention standards other than a voluntary set of standards endorsed by the Ohio Domestic Violence Network (ODVN). In the Dayton area alone, there are at least seven batterer intervention programs with very different requirements and philosophical foundations. For example, some programs accept both men and women into the same treatment groups, some focus on "anger issues" rather than on power and control dynamics, few are monitored by victim service agencies, and most give little recognition to the over-riding context or motivation for violence when assessing the individuals referred to them. Therefore, even while advocates have continued to educate members of the criminal justice system, it is apparent that victim defendants are still being mandated to intervention programs whether or not that particular program meets the ODVN standards. Within this context, the present articl...

Understanding and Addressing Women’s Use of Force in Intimate Relationships: A Retrospective

“…With this understanding, advocate-practitioners were in the difficult position of needing to address the emotional and legal challenges encountered by arrested women coping with the results of their circumstances, all while maintaining an awareness that providing them a formal program to do so could potentially cause women further harm. Gardner (2007) posits that practitioners in these settings may be "inadvertently legitimizing a miscarriage of justice" and, among other things, possibly alienating women who would eventually seek agency services on their own (p. 77). But as conversations about these concerns and how best to proceed waged among advocate-practitioners, women in communities across the United States were navigating domestic violence charges, often without local advocacy programs or defense attorneys.…”

“…Historically, the U.S.-based battered women’s movement often failed to center the voices of women of color in messaging about and responses to IPV (Kanuha, 1996; Richie, 2002; Schechter, 1982). This failure created problems in effectively addressing IPV, particularly in cases where women of color were both IPV survivors and perpetrators (Gardner, 2007). This “racial blindness” (Bilge, 2012) is clear, for example, in the advocacy to make the criminal legal system (CLS) the primary response to IPV in the U.S., advocacy which largely ignored the concerns of women of color about the disproportionate impact of such policies on their partners, their communities, and themselves (Bilge, 2012; Miller, 1989; Potter, 2008; Richie, 2002).…”

“…there is always at least one victim who discusses her frustration that her abusive partner is not being held accountable for his violent behavior. (Gardner, 2007, p. 90)…”

Working with women who use force: a feasibility study protocol of the Positive (+)SHIFT group work programme in Australia

“…The question goes to the heart of the +SHIFT programme’s development—while women who use force are not a homogenous group, the ways in which they predominantly use violence and abuse in their relationships differ markedly from the dominant patterns of male violence towards women in ‘motivation, intent and impact’ 1. Patterns of women’s use of force continue to emerge from research that is specifically focused on community-based domestic violence services 2–8…”

“…Programmes for women in the USA initially developed following legislation mandating arrest in cases of domestic violence 16. In this ‘gendered injustice’17 process many women became ‘caught’ in the criminal justice system when they were not the predominant aggressor 2. Recent research highlights the difficulties in identifying victims of coercive control 18.…”